Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Thursday, December 20, 2007

"Hunting the North American Wild Turkey provides the ultimate challenge to even seasoned hunters. Learn how to outsmart these cagey birds from professional hunter and award-winning turkey caller, Jerry Antley." After watching the 40 minute hunting tutorial in its entirety it occurred to me that the host of the instructional video, Jerry Antley, was much more comfortable speaking to the gobblers than the camera - and likely his wife, whom he mentions in the video.

This short informative video was made in 1999 by the Rhone-Poulenc pharmaceutical company to tell kids all about DDAVP tablets in a hip way that kids would understand. Your hosts, Amy Scott and Tim Summers, "give you the scoop on bedwetting." They get you hip to cool facts like this one: 5 million kids wet the bed - just in the United States. Can you imagine how many wet beds there are in China? Sweet Dude! The melodramatic reenactment of an embarrassing bedwetting incident makes this pharmaceutical informative video a must watch.

Video #3 Hot Country Dancin' with Special Guest Lee GreenwoodFound at Village Discount Outlet, 4027 North Kedzie Avenue, Chicago, Illinois

This gem from 1984 was shot on location at the famous Stagecoach Lounge in Nashville, Tennessee. It is the best country dance instructional I have been able to get my hands on. I have included here the opening scene at the Stagecoach Lounge where Lee Greenwood takes his wife out for a night on the town, but she is swept away by a mustachioed cowboy who knew how to move his boots on the dance floor. Do you know how to two-step cowboy?

Monday, December 10, 2007

Blood and Guns: A Story of War and Passion
Starring: Orson Welles, Thomas Milian and John Steiner

If you poke around on the interweb looking for information on Blood and Guns you are not going to find out much about this one. There is neither an imdb or wikipedia entry under this title. I found a VHS copy of this movie swimming in a sea of delightful terribleness in the back room of Odd Obsession video in Chicago. I was attracted to this movie by the wonderful cover art - an implication of guns and babes within- and because it starred Orson Welles.

Blood and Guns takes place in Mexico during the revolution of 1913. This was a big time for revolutions, just a few years before Lenin and the boys started up with their own bit of shenanigans over Russia way. If you would like to read a bit more about this important period in Mexican history you should read John Reed’s Insurgent Mexico. If you want to watch a hilarious movie with oily-chested depictions of Mexicans speaking in English with a kinda' Italian kinda' Mexican accents, shoot em' ups on horseback, and a car falling over a cliff while engulfed in a ball of flames then Blood and Guns is for you.

This is the most amazing movie ever made. It changed my life. Before I speak any further of this piece of film, I'd like to let you know that I plan to remake ENM shot for shot. I don't care if it takes the rest of my life. I have discovered why I was put on this earth. So, for starters, if anybody finds an old VHS camcorder, let me know and I will buy it. I will breath a new life into this masterpiece.

From the opening credits, I knew that this was love at first sight. The virtual viewer (you or I) is thrusted into a virtual cityscape that is no more than 1D. Mesmerizing. Then, like the world renowned plunge of Snake River Falls, you are suddenly dumped off into the assassination of The Cat, which is all being viewed on the plasma motherfuckin' screens of Warbeck in his secret lair. A beautiful, and naked, woman dives into the pool. Damien slings his death whip around The Cat's neck, sending him spinning and his drink soaring. In one fluid motion, Damien snaps his neck and, like he's done it a thousand times before, catches The Cat's wayward cocktail and takes it down. This scene summarizes this film's Greatness; action, necessity, love, hate, art, fuck, iguana assassins, other stuff. Perfection.

It goes a little something like this: these assassins are controlled by the, as we find in the 3rd act by a "The government can kill, why can't I?" rant or three, criminally insane Warbeck. And this Warbeck has a front, and boy howdy, it is a humdinger. They run a school for assassins. The police just can't seem to get by this squeaky-clean front. That's where the first in a slew of horribly generically named characters, Justin, comes in like a CG tornado - throwing cows and shit. Billy Blanks manages to look both like The Simpsons' interpretation of Mike Tyson and a Wesley Snipes on Down Syndrome, all while kicking an astronomical amount of ass. Oh, and one more thing, these assassins are trained on state-of-the-art virtual reality fighting machines. This reality doesn't manage to look like reality, but they've figured out how to make it hurt like reality. So the question begging to be asked is why not fight in a reality that's within a reality that, you know, looks and is like reality? Maybe reality for example. Well, if they fought in reality, then there would be no excuse for the hacking and the fighting of virtual ninja clowns. Other than that, there's about 40 minutes of people running in different directions and kicking one another while grunting (these are great moments to go and grab that snack). So if the virtual fighting and the reality fighting is the corned beef and swiss, what is the kraut and 1,000 island, you ask. Well, I'm not going to tell, but I am going to tell you to go out there and find those metaphorical reuben toppings for yourself. I'm not gonna live your life for you. Although, I will give Expect No Mercy a vigorous Three and a half stars!!!

Saturday, December 08, 2007

Before the existence of the wonder that is Youtube, there was '15 Minute IT.' It was the year 2000, and Allen brought this gem down to Ohio University from Mentor, OH one Christmas break and almost immediately it became an obsession with all of us. As far as we were concerned, this was the 'Star Wars Kid' of our freshmen year, and back then there was no real venue for this sot of thing. The first time I saw it I was completely baked, and I remember losing control in laughter. It was the kind of thing we'd show at parties, and usually it was shown 3-5 times a night as we dove deeper and deeper into our weed comas. God, were we ever so innocent?

Considering how precious this tape meant to us, you'd think we would've taken better care of it. The tape itself broke at one point, so we had to carefully rip the plastic, and transfer the magnetic tape into another like some sort of open-heart surgery for VHS. We even had a friend of ours transfer it into a Quicktime file, but over the years all of our hard drives crashed, and every copy was lost forever. It was sort of cursed in many ways. But that only added to the legend that was '15 Minute IT.' Over the years, women falling in grape barrels and moms getting punched helped heal the wound of our loss- but it never felt right. I knew the only way to see '15MI' again was to re-create it from memory. And considering I'd seen it dozens upon dozens of times, my mind would be my only reference. Since I had never seen the original 'IT' in the first place, I found that it was like having a bell go off in my head everytime I heard a line like 'Cut 'em! Huh? Cut 'em?!'

The man who put this whole thing together was a kid named Matt Carter. All I really know about him was that he went to Mentor High, and is now living in Columbus. We hope to be getting the original tape very soon, and I've also heard about a '15 Minute Night Of The Living Dead' which I will have wet dreams about until it is posted.